Today is the third anniversary of the passage of President Obama’s Stimulus Pokulus bill, which was supposed to have us at below 6% unemployment by now. How’s that working out?

Whatever. Let’s not quibble over small details, such as being utterly, humiliatingly wrong. Instead, this is a time to celebrate Porkulus’ many accomplishments — the jobs and wealth created. How our (borrowed from China) money was wisely spent. Stories such as this one:

In an effort to stabilize the city’s real estate market, a federal stimulus program has spent nearly $1.5 million on eight Modesto homes that ended up being worth less than $1 million.

Example: Taxpayers paid $223,641 to buy and fix up a foreclosed south Modesto house that was built in 1992. But when the city’s 16-month renovation project was done, the home appraised and sold for only $114,000.

The government lost $109,641 on that just completed deal.

Taxpayers also have spent $109,494 to buy and renovate a 1948-vintage two-bedroom home in Modesto’s airport neighborhood. That house has appraised for only $55,000, and a buyer has yet to be found.

The federally funded Neighborhood Stabilization Program is being managed by the city of Modesto, which plans to resell an additional 18 or more rehabilitated homes this year.

The eight refurbished Modesto homes have cost taxpayers, on average, 34 percent more than appraisers determined they were worth after repairs were complete. That’s an average of $61,487 each.

In investing, that’s called “value destroyed.” And, as of the article’s writing, they weren’t finished!

Happy birthday, Porkulus! Just think of what President Obama can do with four more years!

Jim Pethokoukis gives conservatives and other residents of Reality-ville a great Christmas present: seven charts to flash in the face of liberals (and other unicorn-chasers) when they try to spoil Christmas dinner by talking up Obama. Here’s the one that jumped out at me, the real unemployment rate:

Heckuva recovery, Barry!

I’ll let Jim explains what this represents:

The official (U-3) unemployment rate is 8.6 percent. But the labor force has been shrinking as discouraged workers have been disappeared by government statisticians rather than counted as unemployed. But what if they weren’t? What if the Labor Department added those folks back into the numbers? Well, you would get this.

Remember, Obama and the Smartest Economic Team Ever(tm) promised us that unemployment would go below eight percent if we agreed to his stimulus program. Instead, it’s higher than the White House projected if we didn’t approve the stimulus package. (See Jim’s diagram 1) In fact, the only way it comes even close to White house projections is by not counting people who’ve given up.

Real clever, that.

And once you’re done educating your liberal family members, ask them what possible reason is there is for reelecting Barack Obama?

Because if you don’t hammer Obama every day from now until Election Day with the fact that his stimulus plan caused a net loss of 500,000 jobs, you don’t deserve to win:

Our benchmark results suggest that the ARRA created/saved approximately 450 thousand state and local government jobs and destroyed/forestalled roughly one million private sector jobs. State and local government jobs were saved because ARRA funds were largely used to offset state revenue shortfalls and Medicaid increases rather than boost private sector employment. The majority of destroyed/forestalled jobs were in growth industries including health, education, professional and business services.

(Emphasis added)

That’s from a study (PDF) by economists at Ohio State. In other words, we borrowed and spent nearly one trillion dollars (that’s $1,000,000,000,000) on the assurance of President Obama and the (Social) Democrats that doing so would stimulate the economy, create new jobs, and restore prosperity. Instead, we bought a bunch of pork-barrel projects and waste that only made unemployment worse. We’d have been better off if Obama and Congress had done nothing.

That monument to incompetence alone should cost them the 2012 election.

Wilson’s study makes an important contribution to this debate by focusing on state-by-state comparisons. A large portion of stimulus funding at the state level was based on criteria that were entirely independent of the economic situation that states faced. For example, the number of existing highway miles was used to calculate additional transportation spending.

The study uses this resulting variation in state-level stimulus funding to determine what impact ARRA funding had on employment — including both the direct impact of workers hired to complete planned projects, as well as any broader spillover effects resulting from greater government spending. Administration economists have repeatedly emphasized the importance of this indirect employment growth in driving economic recovery.

The results suggest that though the program did result in 2 million jobs “created or saved” by March 2010, net job creation was statistically indistinguishable from zero by August of this year. Taken at face value, this would suggest that the stimulus program (with an overall cost of $814 billion) worked only to generate temporary jobs at a cost of over $400,000 per worker. Even if the stimulus had in fact generated this level of employment as a durable outcome, it would still have been an extremely expensive way to generate employment.

In other words, on the advice —nay, the insistence!— of the President and (Social) Democratic leadership, we borrowed and blew over $800 billion dollars… for nothing! Well, except for unused airports, frozen fish sperm, and coke for monkeys, among other things.

Actually, it was less than nothing, for the study shows how assistance to state Medicaid programs actually cost jobs:

Interestingly, federal assistance to state Medicaid programs appears to have decreased local and state government employment. One possibility is that requirements to maintain full Medicaid benefits in order to receive federal aid proved sufficiently expensive that state governments pushed though additional rounds of layoffs in non-health related areas.

Oh, well done, you geniuses. Go ahead, pat yourselves on the back. Trusted by the voters to heal a sick economy, you acted like drunken sailors in a brothel on payday and actually made it worse. And now we’re stuck with your hangover. High fives and group hugs all around!!

It’s no wonder the voters took you to the woodshed last month. It is a wonder they didn’t have you shot.

Progressive economics (and, sadly, the economics of some otherwise sensible Republicans) is based on the idea that, in an economic downturn, one relies on government spending to increase domestic consumption in order to stimulate the economy. Sadly, as the history of the 1930s, 1970s and, now, the early 21st century shows, that really doesn’t work. In this video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, the AEI’s Hiwa Alaghebandian explains how Keynesian economics, and thus the entire economic policy of the Obama administration, has it all backwards:

The main insight of the mini-documentary is that Gross Domestic Product (GDP) only measures how national output is allocated between consumption, investment, and government. That’s useful information in many ways, but if we want more output, we should focus on Gross Domestic Income (GDI), which measures how national income is earned.

Focusing on GDI hopefully would lead lawmakers to consider ways of boosting employee compensation, corporate profits, small business income, and other components of national income. Focusing on GDP, by contrast, is misguided since any effort to boost consumption generally leads to less investment. This is why Keynesian policies only redistribute national income, but don’t boost overall output.

The analysis in this video also helps explain why Obama’s so-called stimulus was a flop. The White House genuinely seemed to think a bigger burden of government spending was going to create jobs, but the real-world numbers show higher joblessness.

The basic idea is that increased income leads to increased consumption, not the other way around. One would think this would be common sense, but that apparently assumes a level of economic literacy all too uncommon amongst our policy-makers.

It’s already an old story with the 2009 “stimulus package,” but this report on the number of jobs created here in Los Angeles by Porkulus and what they each cost is just appalling:

More than a year after Congress approved $800 billion in stimulus funds, the Los Angeles city controller has released a 40-page report on how the city spent its share, and the results are not living up to expectations.

“I’m disappointed that we’ve only created or retained 55 jobs after receiving $111 million,” said Wendy Greuel, the city’s controller. “With our local unemployment rate over 12 percent we need to do a better job cutting red tape and putting Angelenos back to work.”

According to the audit, the Los Angeles Department of Public Works spent $70 million in stimulus funds — in return, it created seven private sector jobs and saved seven workers from layoffs. Taxpayer cost per job: $1.5 million.

The Los Angeles Department of Transportation created even fewer jobs per dollar, spending $40 million but netting just nine jobs. Taxpayer cost per job: $4.4 million.

They’d have earned a better return on their investment (with our money) by going to Vegas and betting it all at the roulette wheel.